Frankl had authored what to me is one of the most important books for humanity, Man’s Search for Meaning. Half of his book illustrated what he had experienced in Auschwitz. The last half talked about logotherapy, his school of psychotherapy which posits that man is driven not by libido as believed by Freud, or power as per Adler, but by his never ending search for meaning.

I have read this book a few years ago and it seems I have to read this again and take notes,

In the meantime, here is what Popova extracted from Frankl’s book:

“A man who let himself decline because he could not see any future goal found himself occupied with retrospective thoughts. In a different connection, we have already spoken of the tendency there was to look into the past, to help make the present, with all its horrors, less real. But in robbing the present of its reality there lay a certain danger. It became easy to overlook the opportunities to make something positive of camp life, opportunities which really did exist. Regarding our “provisional existence” as unreal was in itself an important factor in causing the prisoners to lose their hold on life; everything in a way became pointless. Such people forgot that often it is just such an exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself. Instead of taking the camp’s difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised it as something of no consequence. They preferred to close their eyes and to live in the past. Life for such people became meaningless.”

Is this life’s way of telling me that I should stop thinking of the should-haves and the would-haves and the what-ifs and start focusing on what is?